Click here to listen to ‘Who questions the questions?’
We use questions to ask people for information (who’s there?), but we can also use them to make a polite request (could you pass me that?), to confirm social understanding (what a game, eh), and for stylistic effect, such as ironic or rhetorical questions (who knows!).
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about questions! We talk about question intonations from the classic rising pitch? to the British downstep (not a dance move…yet), and their written correlates, such as omitting a question mark in order to show that a question is rhetorical or intensified. We also talk about grammatical strategies for forming questions, from the common (like question particles and tag questions in so many languages), to the labyrinthine history that brings us English’s very uncommon use of “do” in questions. Plus: the English-centrically-named wh-word questions (like who, what, where), why we could maybe call them kw-word questions instead (at least for Indo-European), and why we don’t need to stress out as much about asking “open” questions.
Announcements:
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In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about a project that Gretchen did to read one paper for each of the 103 languages recorded in a recent paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia about child language acquisition. We talk about some of the specific papers that stood out to us, and what Gretchen hoped to achieve with her reading project.
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Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
‘British intonation: Meghan teaches us’ post from English Speech Services
Wikipedia entry for question grammar in Modern Standard Chinese
Yale Grammatical Diversity Project English in North America entry on Canadian Eh
Lingthusiasm episode ‘Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta’
Confirmation or Elaboration: What Do Yes/No Declaratives Want? by Lucan M. Seuren & Mike Huiskes
Superlinguo post ‘New Publication: Questions and answers in Lamjung Yolmo’
Lingthusiasm episode ‘You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality’
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Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
Here’s the link again to ‘Who questions the questions?’
Thanks for listening, and stay Lingthusiastic!
Lauren & Gretchen